My neighbor’s first language is Spanish, but his grasp of English is very good. He went to work for Amazon corporate and said the first several months, coworkers would tear apart his documents on English issues. It worked.

He quickly learned how to write documents up to Amazon standards. Amazon was a terrible place for him anyway (work/life balance), but he certainly wasn’t kept out of the loop. He was forced into the loop.

Very good, that type of rigorous immersion is what should be done for ESL kids at all grade levels during education, otherwise they are at a varying degrees of disadvantage in all subjects

The written meeting format may be less disadvantageous to non-native speakers than the oral format. As the article mentions, it helps presenters sidestep accent issues. And I bet most non-native audiences appreciate being able to see the text instead of having to catch it from a single listen. It helps too that written communication isn't going to be laden with the various side comments, idioms, and in-jokes that an oral presenter always brings.

I think it's easier to read a foreign language than it is to speak it (assuming you know it at all).

I found this to be true for languages that use the same alphabet, but found I could understand spoken languages with different alphabets much faster than I could read them, especially when the direction of reading was different.

Being able to stop, go back, and look stuff up is huge. Googling the common form of a phrase you want to use is huge. Assuming you have basic reading proficiency already.

I’m learning Thai: literacy is not for beginners here. But I look forward to one day googling stuff like I do when reading Hungarian legal contracts.

That’s definitely my experience. The ability to lookup anything you don’t understand and not needing to battle against strong accents and/or poor enunciation makes a big difference.

In my org at least, most of the time the doc is distributed ahead of time. It gives people a chance to spend more time on it or start adding inline comments. But we still start meetings with reading for those that don’t read ahead of time.

You are probably not an amazon knowledge worker unless you have those skills to start with.

IMO, to some extent yes. Just like they'd be 'kept out of the loop' in many other cases for not having the best communication. It's not inherently fair but I don't know how to solve that problem either.

It’s striking that command of written language could be considered an “unfair” expectation in a cerebral, white-collar job.

In a not-very-distant cultural landscape that’s the baseline. Show up on time looking presentable, read, write, summarize, make deductions, discuss. All the domain specific stuff is taught on the job.

How common is the inability to read English at Amazon?

I don't think these people are recruited in the first place. This is about Amazon on the software side.

So, a sizable portion of Indians and Chinese folks? Many Indians have spoken english most of their lives, but definitely tons of Chinese (and other) devs where ESL is a very real thing.

ESL doesn't mean that you can't read or write english. Amazon requiring the devs to be able to read and write english is not really surprising, I would consider it the bare minimum.

Most of the chinese people I've met in tech have been excellent at written English because they learn it starting in primary school. They're just uncomfortable speaking it.